Day 253/365: Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero Arcade offers players the chance to select their favorite song from a library of 50 popular titles. Choose either lead or bass guitar & rock with your favorite band. A 32″ LCD monitor allows the player to join the band on stage and the High-Def Graphics give the players an in-your-face experience, unique to arcade play. Equipped with 2 Enduro-AX Industrial strength guitars, an 8 speaker sound system & over 400 LEDs Guitar Hero Arcade will turn any location into a concert hall.

The Axe

The main catch of Guitar Hero is its Gibson SG-based guitar peripheral, and though you can play the game with a standard controller, the SG guitar is essential to completing the experience. If you plan on playing the game’s two-player mode, you’ll definitely want to pick up a second SG (don’t stick your buddies with a regular pad).

The SG features five fret buttons, a strummer (instead of strings to pick), a whammy bar, and is roughly the same size as a travel guitar. It’s pretty comfortable to wear, not only because of its light weight but because it’s reasonably close to the size of a real guitar – 75% the total size or so is a reasonable guess – so it doesn’t feel awkward in your hands as it might if you were holding a toy.

The best part about the guitar is that it incorporates most of the real life techniques and motions that a guitarist would perform on a real instrument. Hammer-ons, pull-offs and up-down strumming all work with this device, making the transition from the real thing to the Guitar Hero SG as minor as moving from strings to buttons. Had the guitar not allowed for conventional techniques that are second-nature in a guitarist’s repertoire, it would have been crippling. Smartly, Red Octane has designed the peripheral to not only utilize these techniques in the songs, but to embrace real guitar playing styles and techniques as well. Kudos for that.